the TelePrompTer was invented when Eisenhower was president

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Doc Mercer

EOG Master
does everyone remember Reagan as "The Great Communicator" for his style?

Here are some choice excerpts from articles written in the first year of Reagan's first term (1981)

The Washington Post, (5/10/81)

Personally, I am reassured by the easy manner in which the president sidesteps his own hard-line rhetoric and overheated ideology in favor of pragmatic political decisions. That confirms what longtime students of Reagan, particularly The Post's White House correspondent, Lou Cannon, have always insisted was the core of Reagan's political style. One eye on the teleprompter and the other eye on the voters.


The New York Times, (7/12/81)

For seasoned watchers of President Reagan, his mid-week speech in Chicago was a familiar scene gone slightly, and tellingly, awry. His trusty index cards had given way to a teleprompter. The crisp cadences of his off-the-cuff orations were replaced by long and harshly partisan sentences that visibly wearied both Mr. Reagan and his audience. Despite the last-minute effort by aides to correct a "mistake" in the speech text, Mr. Reagan admitted that his appointment of Judge Sandra Day O'Connor to the United States Supreme Court culminated a "search for a highly qualified woman."


The Washington Post, (9/28/81)

In one of his many stumbles and omissions of words or phrases apparently because of difficulties Reagan had reading from a teleprompter, the president dropped the second clause of that sentence when he delivered the speech at the Rivergate Convention Center here.

The Globe And Mail (Canada), in an article titled: "How to keep Reagan's foot out of his mouth" (12/18/81)

The former Hollywood actor impresses his audiences when there is a TelePrompTer rolling out a speech for him to read or when the points he should make are written on three-by-five-inch cue cards. But give him a question for which he can't recite an answer and he flounders about, offering vague generalities and giving every indication of an embarrassing lack of knowledge.from the New York Times in August of '81, which grudgingly predicts how history would eventually see Reagan:

Sound booms, television cameras, klieg lights and, on some oncamera figures, makeup, contributed a distinctively theatrical aura to the occasion. In fact, business seemed to take a back seat to the media event. What color shirt shows best on television? How does one gracefully read a speech from a Teleprompter? Most importantly how does one communicate credibly with an unseen audience? Chief executives might begin by studying the technique of a current master of the small screen, Ronald Reagan.

Writing a story about TelePrompTer usage is only really relevant when some sort of gaffe happens -- which did happen to Reagan quite a bit (although nobody remembers it now). There was one valid Obama TelePrompTer story two weeks ago (on Saint Patrick's Day), when there was a snafu with loading an Irish leader's text, but it actually was mostly ignored by the American media. Whoever was running the TelePrompTer cued up Obama's speech by mistake (for the Irishman), which he then began reading... and then Obama made a joke of it by immediately thanking him as "President Obama"... much to the amusement of the press, who laughed loudly at Obama's ad lib. But when no gaffe exists, no story exists. Or "should exist," if the media universe was a rational place.

The mainstream media needs to get over themselves, and they really need to realize that making fun of Obama for using a TelePrompTer is the most idiotic thing they've come up with yet to criticize about Barack Obama -- because in today's world, it's like making fun of someone for watching cable television, or for using a personal computer (how ridiculous would a story be that began: "President Obama used one of those new-fangled personal computing devices today..."?).
 

Doc Mercer

EOG Master
Re: the TelePrompTer was invented when Eisenhower was president

Bush could barely speak in public so "not a lot of room" for ya to yap is there?

I can whip out some of Bush's finer moments if needed
 
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